• 0 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

help-circle


  • I’ve been installing a lot of things written in rust recently, and I’ve noticed a trend between them. They’re all stable, fast, and very user-friendly. I don’t really have to fiddle with them nearly as much. I think there’s a lot that goes into this, but it really boils down to: rust is safer and prevents huge categories of bugs, it’s incredibly stable and requires less debugging and maintenance, it has extremely high level abstractions to make development quick and less verbose, and it has the best tooling I have seen for any language. It enables developers so effectictively that the things that are usually tedious and difficult become easy and potentially mandatory, and so you just get better software.

    I know that sounds pretty abstract and opinionated, but having used the language for several years now, and especially coming from Java, I have really felt an incredible difference - I stopped having to constantly fix breaking Gradle builds and JVM version management, I stopped getting null pointer exceptions, and I had much more powerful tools for building abstractions. When you see how much control and power rust gives you while still keeping you safe, it’s just night and day compared to the especially old languages like C.

    Basically, anything written in rust will be better if it can enable developers to spend their time working on useful features instead of fixing bugs, fiddling with build systems and fragile legacy infrastructure cobbled together from dozens of third party tools.



  • I remember back in the day I thought one of my favorite games, Elite: Dangerous, would never run on Linux. I dualbooted for a while just so I could play it. After a while I stopped playing it much and figured I could get rid of Windows, so I did. About a year later the community came out with a complicated setup you could perform to get it running on Linux through wine. It’s just as you said, lots of manually finding and installing libraries, tweaking environments, and eventually got it working (jankily) at a pretty mediocre framerate. I thought that was the best I was going to get. Another two years and it was running seamlessly on proton with no configuration or tweaking at all. It really is incredible what Valve has done for Linux gaming.





  • people learn things all the time despite phones existing. the issue is not solely being more entertaining. people need to find their learning meaningful and aligned with their own interests and goals. students don’t, and so they go on their phones. go to a college classroom and you’ll see people more engaged on average. still far from perfect, and that system is broken in many ways too, but people are at least studying something they chose and are presumably interested in.

    “I’m really rooting for you to figure this out” rings hollow. we all need to be part of the solution. gen Z feels like it’s carrying the expectation of fixing literally every societal problem right now and it sucks.